Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) is a workflow description language that addresses the need to sequence a series of web service calls to create composite web services. BPEL allows the use of basic rules and data manipulation to support this and is effective at what it does. However, business processes commonly involve people. BPEL was designed for system-to-system interactions, not interactions that involve human beings. Accordingly, it doesn't define mechanisms focused on interacting with people.
In recognition of the fact that BPEL execution chains sometime need humans involved as part of their processing flows, standards activity has been focused on extensions such as BPEL4People and the Task Execution Language (TEL) to cover a broad range of scenarios that involves people within business processes. However, involving humans in these critical business processes poses some real issues with respect to how these tasks can be handled in real life scenarios. There exists a specific need for modifications to the current state of the art for better integration of humans into business process automation chains.